What was the precursor to the present day internet

An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts. A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex. When asked to explain my role in the creation of the internet, I generally use the example of a city.

I helped to build the roads—the infrastructure that gets things from point A to point B. Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realisation that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realisations from many sides.

This experimental link used a telephone line with an acoustically coupled modem, and transferred digital data using packets. When the first packet-switching network was developed, Leonard Kleinrock was the first person to use it to send a message. A second attempt proved successful and more messages were exchanged between the two sites.

President Dwight D. Their aim was to help American military technology stay ahead of its enemies and prevent surprises, such as the launch of the satellite Sputnik 1, happening again.

Roberts was the first person to connect two computers. By , 30 academic, military and research institutions had joined the network, connecting locations including Hawaii, Norway and the UK.

The term is used to describe a set of protocols that govern how data moves through a network. After the creation of ARPANET, more networks of computers began to join the network, and the need arose for an agreed set of rules for handling data. The address on the datagram can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside. Kahn and Cerf called this method transmission-control protocol TCP.

Every device connected to the internet is given a unique IP number. Known as an IP address, the number can be used to find the location of any internet-connected device in the world. In the early s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks LANs.

An increase in the amount of computers on the network made it difficult to keep track of all the different IP addresses. It was one of the innovations that paved the way for the World Wide Web. As the network increased in popularity and scope, users quickly realised the potential of the network as a tool for sending messages between different ARPANET computers.

Ray Tomlinson , an American computer programmer, is responsible for electronic mail as we know it today. When DNS was introduced, this was extended to user host. Early email users sent personal messages and began mailing lists on specific topics. The development of email showed how the network had transformed. Rather than a way of accessing expensive computing power, it had started to become a place to communicate, gossip and make friends.

From the s onwards, the home computer industry grew exponentially. Computers were embedded with the rhetoric of the future and learning, but in most cases this meant learning to program so that people could actually make the technology do something, such as play games.

Between and , the network grew from 2, hosts to 30, The first few sales were to government agencies, the A. Nielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. By Remington-Rand which had purchased the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in had sold forty-six machines. The Online Library Learning Center website is no longer being maintained, so information may be out-of-date. This website should now be used as an historical reference. Dave Farber of the University of Delaware reveals a project to build an inexpensive network using dial-up phone lines.

This broadens access to the internet and allows for email communication between multiple nations of the world. Paul Mockapetris, Jon Postel and Craig Partridge create the Domain Name system, which uses domain names to manage the increasing number of users on the internet.

In , the first domain is registered : symbolics. A watershed year for the internet comes in Microsoft launches Windows 95; Amazon, Yahoo and eBay all launch; Internet Explorer launches; and Java is created, allowing for animation on websites and creating a new flurry of internet activity. In , Congress passes the Communications Decency Act in an effort to combat the growing amount of objectionable material on the internet. Google is founded in In , the music and video piracy controversy intensifies with the launch of Napster.